


The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain): 3. Disorganisation

by rallamajoop



Series: The Opposite of Death [3]
Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-16 10:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallamajoop/pseuds/rallamajoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the game, it takes Neku three weeks to get himself to go talk to Hanekoma, but barely five minutes to regret it.</p>
<p>Technically gen, but could just as easily be taken as Neku/Joshua pre-slash if you want to see it that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain): 3. Disorganisation

So it should probably have been a given that readjusting to being alive again would take a bit of doing, with or without all that crazy selective memory stuff everyone who ever knew Neku had so conveniently done when he got back. It takes a bit longer for Neku to get around to admitting that winning the game, even winning it three weeks running, isn't the same as being able to stop playing it somewhere in the back of his mind. It sure as hell isn't anything like being able to forget about it. It's there in all sorts of things – the recurring dream about waking up in the Scramble Crossing, the nagging need to look over his shoulder for Taboo Noise, the part of him that's always secretly disappointed that a pin is just a pin now and not a tool that will let him summon fire or fling a motorbike across the street. It's a novelty just to be able to walk around Shibuya without having to worry every couple of blocks that he's about to run head first into a Reaper wall; the places he passes aren't just Udagawa or Centre Street or Hachiko anymore, they're the place Shiki barely bailed him out of a surprise Noise attack or the place there'd been flowers for Beat and Rhyme's memorial or the place he first saw Minamimoto's junk piles. It's hard to go anywhere without wondering if right at that moment the Game is on again and there might be invisible players right in front of him, struggling to master Psyches or make head or tail of what Shibuya's fashion trends have to do with their survival. Neku came out of the game changed and mostly glad of it, but Shibuya has changed too – a whole other world opened under his feet only to be closed again just as suddenly, and if he's ever going to be able to put it out of his mind again he's not there yet.

It was a full week before he worked up the guts to set foot in any of the shops with the innocuous Reaper decal stamped by their door, and even then he spent the whole time it took to eat his taco watching customers come and go, just in case he caught sight of one disappearing the moment they stepped out of the door. It takes two more weeks on top of that before he 'gets around' to venturing into Cat Street for the first time, home of the infamous Mr H, a.k.a. Sanae Hanekoma, mild mannered café owner; a.k.a. Cat, secretive artist and designer; a.k.a…. well, they never did quite clear that part up, did they? The Wildcat has no more customers than he ever remembers it having, the owner cracking a broad grin as he walks in ("Phones! Long time no see!" "…yeah, sorry, I did this crazy thing where I went and got a life." He hadn't intended that to make Mr H. laugh so hard). To kill time, Neku forks over the price of a cup of coffee and fields a few innocuous questions about the health of himself and a couple of friends: he's doing fine, Shiki's doing just great, and by the way, Beat is fine too, before you ask…

"Oh, Beat?" says Hanekoma. "He was in here a good two weeks ago. Stopped past to say the menu was over his budget and he still doesn't get quite how you all made it back at all, but he wanted to thank me for everything I did for Rhyme in that first week and apologise for taking off like that. He's a good kid."

Trust Beat, thinks Neku. Just when he thought he had the guy figured out to the third decimal place, he goes and makes himself the one first in line to break the Cat Street embargo – which Neku had not, okay, actually bothered to tell him about in so many words, so if the others hadn't taken it as the given he'd assumed it was, he had no-one else to blame. Beat hadn't had nearly as good a seat as Neku to… well, whatever the hell it was that had gone down when they'd confronted the 'Composer' at last, so he hasn't even got any real reason to suspect Mr H. of anything sleazy, and suspicions aside, they all owe Mr H. their lives at least once over. But that doesn't negate what Neku really came here to talk about either.

Five minutes here and already it's not going to plan – not that he'd ever bothered to plan this out. There'd been some kind of expectation in his head that it would all have to be either easier or harder – either Mr H would spill the whole story the moment he walked in or he'd get to Cat Street to find the Wildcat was gone and the street address was now filled by a pet shop filled of tropical fish, and run by a foreigner who spoke only enough Japanese to insist she'd been working there for years. What he's been forgetting somehow is that he's dealing with a guy who'll happily tell you his shoe size and star sign before getting within light years of mentioning that the reason he was qualified to hand out helpful little pearls of advice about the Reaper's Game had something to do with how he was one of the same shadowy figures up there in charge of administrating it. Truth be told, Neku isn't sure he wants to know what Mr H's deal is. He has enough to get his head around already, including the part he came here to ask about, and if he doesn't ask now he's going to lose his nerve and then he'll probably never get to at all.

"So all that stuff about Joshua, that was what, some kind of cover story?" He tries to make it sound more nonchalant than bitter. He probably isn't succeeding so well.

Mr H's eyebrows winch themselves up a notch. "Cover story? Phones, if you're going to change gears that fast, you're going to have to give the rest of us a bit more chance to catch up."

"Don't play dumb, Mr H," and this is one he's had stuck in his gut so long now it feels like he's pulling it out with a claw hammer, "I'm talking about how you let me think the only reason he knew so much about the Game was because he was some psychic kid who hung out at your shop!"

"Sure he was," says Hanekoma, so easily it makes Neku's teeth hurt. "You don't learn all the ins and outs of the Reaper's Game from the back of a cereal packet. You think I'd lie to you about something like that, Phones?"

"Mr H, he was the Composer all along!" Saying it out loud doesn't make thunder rumble, doesn't make Shibuya crumble to the ground, and that seems wrong.

"Oh, since you met him, sure. But he wasn't _born_ Composer. I told you we went way back."

Neku has to take a minute to process that into his post-Game world-view, to decide that Hanekoma isn't just stringing him along here this time, then another minute to feel dumb he hadn't guessed it for himself. But damn it, the sane response to finding out you've been lied to isn't to underestimate where the lies started. There's still the matter of Mr H. letting him assume Joshua was just a regular player, but there was no way to bring that up that didn't sound like whining even in his own head.

"How long back?" he asks stupidly.

"Waaaaay back," Hanekoma grins, as much answer as Neku was going to get.

"He spent the week making me think his whole goal was to _become_ Composer."

"Just his way of nudging you in the right direction. There'd be the nostalgia factor for him too – even our Composer's not immune to that." He fixes Neku with a look over the top of his spectacles. "Listen up, Phones – I'll share something with you you wouldn't hear from anyone else. I've seen my share of Composers come and go. Josh may not have been born Composer, but he was born to be one. I'm not just talking about his 'special' powers among the living. Succession's a cutthroat business anywhere about Harrier in the Reaper Brass, but Josh got his sights set on it, coasted through his week and was through the door before anyone knew what was happening. I won't tell you he never broke a sweat doing it, but he went head to head with one of the toughest Games played anywhere in the world and made it look easy. And between you and me, he's been bored out of his skull ever since."

"He seems like the kind of guy who makes his own fun."

"Sure, but having a city under your thumb isn't all you might think it is. There's rules even a Composer doesn't get to break. Running a city might keep a body occupied, but the thrill was in the chase for him, and he hasn't had that since. 'May you get everything you ever asked for' is a curse in some parts of the world."

Put like that it's a little too easy to picture. No wonder razing the place to the ground entered the agenda. "Leaving Shibuya in the hands of a spoiled brat."

"Absolute power corrupts a lot of folks much worse," Hanekoma shrugs. "It's pretty lonely at the top. Like I said the first time, he's not a bad kid, he's just not so good at reaching out to people. Can you blame him, with where he's coming from? You of all people should know how hard it is to make friends when you won't admit you need 'em. Takes a big person to make the first move for someone like that."

Neku's had so much food for thought out of this conversation already that he's going to be chewing over it in his head for weeks, so it takes him a moment to get to noticing just exactly what Mr H. actually said. "Oh no. No no no. Please tell me you're not saying what I think you are."

"Did I say anything?" Hanekoma remains the very picture of unconvincing innocence.

"I _tried_ being his friend! It fell apart around about when he got around to admitting he'd he killed me, wiped my mind and spent the whole time I knew him screwing me over!"

"How's all that working out for you?" says Hanekoma, like the worst Joshua's done is enter Neku in a cake raffle without his knowledge.

Neku slams both hands down on the counter, hears his stool screech across the floor behind him and wobble precariously back and forth several times. "You talked me into trusting him once already! It ended with him waving everything in my face and shooting me again!" The part where he woke up alive again afterwards is a bit of a sticking point in that complaint, but it hardly invalidates it. "Mr H, he's done nothing but play me from the day we met! You can't make me believe he meant for it to work out this way. He wanted to burn Shibuya to the ground!"

"Bit much for you to complain he took you out first then."

"He treats life and death like it's some sort of game!"

"And yet here you are – and all your new friends – alive and better than ever! Sure he doesn't deserve maybe a little credit for engineering that?"

Neku sits back down again with a thud, finds a crack in the countertop and develops the crazy idea that it's laughing at him. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am." He looks up reluctantly, only to discover to his horror that, for what is barely the second time today, Hanekoma actually looks serious.

"Neku, as I recall it, that last game wasn't quite so one sided. I recall there being a gun in your hands too. Even some kind of instruction to fire on the count of ten? A chance to take all you anger out at him in one shot?"

"So? He _knew_ I wouldn't."

"Did he?"

"He was sure feeling pretty safe about it."

"So what do you think would have happened if you'd fired it?"

_I'd be Composer?_ The thought had hardly even struck him at the time. "Not a lot. I saw what happened when Pi-face tried to shoot him."

"Was that really why you didn't shoot?"

Why? What did he mean, was that why? It was so obvious in Neku's head there was no way to put it into words. There _had_ been one rage-filled moment when he could almost believe he was going to do it – he'd been laughed at, put through hell, threatened with losing everything he'd never known he had, and he'd wanted nothing more than to splatter Joshua's brains all over the wall. It hadn't lasted through the count to ten. You just _couldn't_ go from thinking you owe someone your life to being prepared to kill them with not even five minutes to think about it. What kind of person could do something like that?

Because even if he was 99% sure he couldn't have touched Joshua with a bazooka – even if he was convinced he was really going to die and a bullet would be the best parting gift he had to give – he'd still have had to die knowing he'd pulled the trigger.

"So what, I'm pathetic because I wasn't prepared to kill someone I hate?" Neku mutters. The crack in the counter top still looks like it's laughing at him.

"Nah," says Hanekoma, master of all the universe's open secrets. "But you just might be alive because of it."

Neku has finally, officially, had enough of this for today. Enough of this for a lifetime. _Two_ lifetimes. He knows he's going to be turning this over in his head all day, if not all week and beyond – knows with a kind of sad inevitability that the longer he goes at it, the more he's going to be finding stuff in what Mr H just told him that he can't ignore, no matter how much he doesn't like it. But he figures he's got at least a few good hours of perfectly good denial left before he gets to the worst of it, so he might as well make a head start.

"Well, if he ever wants to apologise for screwing me over, he knows where to find me."

He's most of the way to the door when he hears Hanekoma say, "I'll pass that on, shall I?"

"Yeah," says Neku, hardly hearing himself over what sounds like all of Shibuya buzzing in his ears, "you do that."


End file.
